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| Popmatters |
 Trevor Powers, the 22-year-old guy behind Youth Lagoon, pulls off a pretty clever trick with The Year of Hibernation. It feels, at first, like a breezy record. The gauzy layers of keys and guitar, those spacious drum-machine beats, Powers’ keening vocals with their sense of wonder (something like a more tuneful Daniel Johnston), it all sounds sweet, downright wistful.Once you dig into the record, though, you get immersed in those hazy textures, and there’s some serious worry beneath them. The Year of Hibernation is about retreat from the world for a reason. It’s a deeply anxious record, one that channels into Powers’ fears, even as he crowds them with tones we generally find relaxing. Opener “Posters” shows this perfectly. The first half of the song features dreamy keys surging in the background while Powers bleats out his feelings. “I used to be outspoken,” he admits. “Do anything for anyone’s attention.” He sings this with a charge to his voice, but then he falters. Things have changed. “You make real friends quickly,” he then says, and with a wobbly whisper he adds, “But not me.” From there, a simple bass line comes in like a ticking clock, and when the beat kicks up it is jarring, even frightening. It’s not a surge of energy, it’s a spike of panic. It buries Powers’s singing further in the mix, and you can feel the anxiety flowing around him. There’s an almost childlike insistence of hope in these songs—“I have more dreams than you have posters of your favorite teams,” he assures us on “Cannons”—but it too often seems small in comparison to the mounting tension. The best moments of the record cut through that miasmic tension with a sharp guitar riff, as on “Posters” or “Afternoon”. In other places, Powers’s otherwise obscured vocals—they’re often rendered impossible to understand by a thick cloud of echo and hiss—clear and deliver a sweet sentiment or heartbreaking worry, or sometimes both. “When I was 17, my mother said to me ‘Don’t stop imagining’,” he sings on “17”. “The day that you do is the day that you die.” It’s a sweet ode to youthful, even naïve hope, and to the support of family, but it’s also troubling, since Powers sounds so often close to losing that imagination. How he composes these tracks is awfully imaginative, though, combining the dreamy keys and beats of electro-pop with the tense guitars of jangle-pop to create something decidedly moodier than either of those. His imagination does falter, though, when it comes to relating this anxiety to us as an audience. We get a vague idea of what this fear feels like—the music is evocative enough—but as the album’s title implies, this is often an insular affair. The trouble with hibernation is that it wholly closes the subject off from its habitat, from the world, which makes it a pretty tough study. Similarly, Powers—only as a musical persona, by the way—feels too removed from us. A line here or there lays fear out plainly but indistinctly, so this doesn’t always resonate as much as it could. In the end, this captures one experience and we need some conduit, some specifics among all these blurred sounds and sentiments, to understand this in any concrete way....full text |
| Sputnikmusic |
| Trevor Powers may be a year older than me, but already I can’t help thinking of him as a little brother. The 22-year-old’s solo project Youth Lagoon manages to burrow that bloodline-deep. This isn't just due to his fragile, slightly effeminate voice; full of quiet wonder, yet prone to passionate eruptions. Nor is it just the endearing playfulness of his melodies. It’s not simply the daydream haze of the reverb, the big-small magic of the song structure, the charmingly reverential apron-tugging of the influences, the anxiety which flows quietly beneath the surface, or the occasional flaw from an unconscious stubbornness. Of course, it is all these things. But it's something else, something grander which really brings about my big brother instinct. The Year of Hibernation nuzzles into this nook of subconscious familiarity and makes its bed there. Lightly clouded by reverb after being recorded in a four-car garage, Powers' music sounds like the symphonies floating unconscious in the heads of daydreaming school kids. From the simple, mirthful melody which introduces Powers’ delicate voice on ‘Afternoon’ to the uplifting woah-ohs which see out the album, Youth Lagoon’s debut consistently delivers on the suggestion of its appellation: youth. The aforementioned ‘Afternoon’ positively beams optimism and irony-free cheerfulness, from the infectious, whistled melody to the late-coming drums, yet it does so in a way which escapes the bubblegum effect. The Year of Hibernation doesn’t lose its flavour and end up becoming sickly or an effort to sit through. It’s too mature, too charming an album for that. It just happens to also have been created by a guy who seems to possess the vision few of us have left: that of a kid. It helps too that not every track is written in this buoyant vein. The one-two centrepiece of ‘July’ and ‘Montana’ not only evidence that Powers is capable of writing songs which captivate and delight in equal, slow-burning measure, but also that he can manage beautifully the representation of more troubling youthful emotions. The paralyzing anxieties of growing up are given their aural interpretation in the fragility of the record, and Powers is more anxious than most; there are sections where it seems as if the album might smash into tiny pieces at any moment. It's heartbreaking. But when Powers confronts and overpowers the "sickness in [his] head" with this brave optimism, with this strength he gathers from good memories, that's when the album truly flourishes. ‘Montana’ is especially moving as Powers croons in a slightly more morose tone over understated piano as the song's elements build. The bass pedal arrives to echo the piano, Powers' delivery gathers power amongst the handclaps and guitars, and yet, like ‘July’, the song's crescendo doesn’t feel cluttered, forced or trite. It feels like a genuine outpour. Because that's what it is....full text |
| Prettymuchamazing |
| Trevor Powers, the Boise-based multi-instrumentalist who dream pop-ifies his diary entries into songs as Youth Lagoon, is twenty-two years old. His age is only relevant because his grasp of melody is far beyond his years––he writes songs as timeless and effortless as though they had always existed––but his music simultaneously bears a refreshing, electrifying newness. Powers’ first record as Youth Lagoon is called The Year of Hibernation, which is on one hand rather erroneous a title for such a considered body of work and on the other a perfect match for his bright, nostalgic musical dreamscapes, somewhere at crossroads of lo-fi and chillwave, all fuzzy guitar riffs intertwined with electronic percussion and synth arpeggios. The product is a sound as intimate as it is expansive, transcendent of Powers’ bedroom studio but never quite forgetting its humble beginnings. Powers’ singing is heavily processed and buried in enough distorted haze that it sounds like he’s calling to you from the other end of the tunnel, but his voice is so tender and fragile (think the Antlers’ Peter Silberman’s heart wrenching delivery crossed with the eerie, raw sweetness of Deerhunter’s Lockett Pundt on “Agoraphobia”) that every word is loaded with a confessional quality, a soft secret, a disarming honesty. His instrumentals are complex and varied; soft piano notes seem to bloom into harsher, driving guitar chords you could easily cut out of Youth Lagoon and into the repertoire of punk-influenced lo-fi bands like Cloud Nothings. Vocals and music mélange to create a dreamy, sun-blinded nostalgia – these are songs with titles like “17,” “Afternoon,” “Daydream,” songs about times and places and memories, about things that are fleeting. Songs like “Cannons” and “Montana” have a kind of hallucinatory buildup into a huge, driving melody, like watching something explode in slow motion. They are songs that feel like Powers wrote them so he could remember those fleeting things, or maybe so that he wouldn’t have to remember them anymore. Everything has enough of a catchy toe-tapping earworm on liquid guitar or bright synth bells that you’ll have to remember it instead. We just wish there were more tracks to earworm their way into our heads – the record’s eight songs are hardly enough space for Powers to showcase his talent and versatility. It’s not that the tracks sound too similar – they’re part of a unified vision, but don’t seem like carbon copies – it’s that they’ll leave you wanting to hear what else Powers can do....full text |
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